And he was the man who had done it.
He was the man, therefore, who must do his best to undo it. He knew what he had to do. He hated taking action like this, he was as bad as Mahmoud about preventive detention. It always seemed to him merely coercive, the antithesis of the way he normally liked to proceed, which had some sort of relation to justice.
There was no help for it, however. He got up and went into the outer office. Nikos was at his desk working. Georgiades was sitting in a corner, depressed. He looked up as Owen entered.
‘Fetch me Djugashvili,’ said Owen.
‘What is the charge?’ said Djugashvili.
‘I will be handing you over to Mr. El Zaki shortly,’ said Owen, ‘and he will be presenting charges of inducing and inciting in connection with a raid on a cafe.’
He caught the quick look of relief on Djugashvili’s face. ‘Meanwhile, I shall be holding you under my powers with relation to security.’
‘In what connection?’ asked Djugashvili.
‘In connection with a projected attempt on the life of Grand Duke Nicholas.’
Djugashvili shrugged.
‘It’s all beside the point now, isn’t it?’ he said bitterly.
‘Why so?’
‘It’s all effectively come to an end, hasn’t it?’
‘Has it?’
‘You’ve got the gold. We won’t be able to raise another lot in time.’
Owen deliberated.
‘What did you intend to do with the gold?’ he said at last. Djugashvili laughed.
‘Buy explosives, of course.’
‘You would still buy them?’
‘I certainly would.’
‘Why?’ said Owen. ‘When you already have them?’
Djugashvili stared at him.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The explosives,’ said Owen. ‘They came into Suez, didn’t they? And you were going to collect them. When you’d got the money. Only it had to be in gold, so it was taking a bit of time. But there the explosives were, at Suez, just waiting for you and the money.’
‘Well?’
‘You almost make me think,’ said Owen, ‘that you are not the ones who took them.’
Djugashvili looked stunned.
‘Someone else?’ he whispered. Then he recovered. ‘Someone else!’ he said. ‘And they’ve got the explosives already?’ He laughed triumphantly. ‘Then it will go ahead! You cannot stop it now!’
‘If not you,’ said Owen, ‘then who? Have you got any idea?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Djugashvili. ‘I’ve got an idea!’
‘I want to know,’ said Owen.
Djugashvili laughed, and was still laughing as he was taken to the cells.
The men had come at four o’clock in the afternoon when only the most alert of Cairo’s citizens had risen from their post-prandial beds, and even these were still shaking the sleep from their eyes. The Nubian wrestler was possibly not one of the most alert and it was this, Selim had supposed, that had accounted for the slight delay before he arrived on the scene. In the interval Selim had fought like a lion. This was not just his own view but the view of the considerable number of spectators that gathered outside Mustapha’s cafe in a remarkably short space of time.
According to Selim, he had been partaking of refreshment in the kitchen with Mustapha’s wife when the sound of splintering wood had drawn his attention to the main room at the front. He had entered it to find two men engaged in breaking up the furniture and Mustapha prudently scuttling for the stairs. Selim had drawn his baton and laid into the two men. A lucky blow on the elbow had virtually disabled one and Selim was left free to concentrate on giving the other a taste of justice. This was proceeding very satisfactorily when three other men had burst into the room.
Things had then livened up appreciably. The expert Selim had found himself confronted by other experts. Had he been the average Cairo constable he would at this juncture sensibly have made for the back door. Selim, however, as he pointed out to Owen afterwards, was not the average Cairo constable. He was, first, bigger and, second, inclined to the robust. A melee with fists, feet, and furniture flying was exactly the situation in which he felt himself most at home, which was why, in fact, the inhabitants of his home village, after much experience, had pointed him strongly to a career in the Cairo constabulary and gone so far as to promise to supplement his wages if he stayed there. Faced with a challenge, and still smarting from Mustapha’s taunts over what he considered his failure on the previous occasion, the last thing Selim had in mind was retreating.
Nevertheless, there were three of them, not to mention the two already lying groaning on the floor, and they were all, Selim soon recognized, as used as he was to this kind of thing. It was now, however, that his true colours were valiantly revealed. For he fought like a demented lion (lion, according to Selim, demented, according to the spectators). Furniture flew, chairs crashed, both on him and on his assailants, and after a hectic interval, his assailants stepped back to regroup.
Two more men appeared.
Mustapha’s wife ran back into the kitchen for boiling water. Selim, still defiant, but now breathing heavily and already somewhat battered, prepared to make his last stand.
At which point the Nubian wrestler, risen, apparently, at last from his slumbers, waddled into the cafe.
He picked up the two men nearest him, cracked their skulls together and threw them into opposite corners of the room. He picked up another and tied his arms and legs and, possibly, his neck-or so it looked to Owen when he came upon the scene shortly afterwards-into a knot. He bounced the fourth man first off the wall, then off the ceiling and finally off himself (it was the latter that proved the coup de grace); and then advanced happily on the last man, who was by this time looking for the nearest exit.
All this was very satisfactory, especially as there were two further men lying stunned outside. If only it had stopped there! Unfortunately, the Nubian wrestler, slow to rouse, was hard to quieten down again, and he was still throwing the men around when Owen arrived on the spot quite some minutes later, by which time, as Mustapha bitterly pointed out, the damage done to the cafe was far in excess of what it would have been if the gang had been allowed a free hand in the first place.
Owen was only able to bring things to a halt by the expedient of removing the bodies one by one as they hit the wall, so that in the end the Nubian was left with nothing else to throw. He stood for a few moments looking around him in baffled surprise and then shambled out.
Thus (roughly), was Selim’s perception of events, recounted afterwards as he stood covered with gore and glory in the kitchen with Mustapha’s wife sponging his wounds. It was not, however, entirely as he supposed. For one thing, the Nubian wrestler had not, in fact, been buried in his slumbers when the gang arrived; he had been sent on an errand by Mustapha.
‘Well, I wasn’t going to let that little twit go on his own, was I?’ said Mustapha, defending himself. ‘That tooth cost a lot of money.’
The tooth was the one he had lost in the initial fracas at the cafe. Mustapha had made up his mind that the time had come to restore it to its rightful position and had sent Mekhmet with it to see the dentist with instructions to prepare it for reinsertion.
‘No sense in getting a new one, is there? Gold is gold.’
In view of the tooth’s value, he had decided to provide Mekhmet with an escort, a factor which, as Selim, aggrieved, observed, had weakened the cafe’s defences at a crucial point and contributed in no small measure to the damage the cafe had sustained. Mustapha’s wife added in support that Mustapha had only himself to blame, for he had sent the two men out in the hottest part of the day when any reasonable man knew they could not be expected to hurry.
Hurried they had not, for the wrestler found it necessary to stop at various points to refresh himself with cheap Sudanese marissa beer, with the result that as they were approaching home on their return journey he had been obliged to go up a side street to relieve his bladder. It had thus been Mekhmet alone who had entered the street just as the storyteller was pointing out the cafe to the gang. He had run back at once to fetch the wrestler but by then precious time had been lost.